Tim Carter: The Game Trailer Auteur (Self-Ridicule Intended)

I think I made the very first "game trailer".  The very first video that spliced gameplay action over music.

It was 1987. I was in my second year of film school (God, how I hate that term - film school... But it did let you make mistakes as a creator; it was an incubation space). Anyway, we had to do a video cut to music. So I convinced my buddy, Ed Vitunski, to go down to the arcade strip on Yonge Street, here in Toronto...

Then, Yonge was a seedy street, with lots of these quarter arcades... Now?... It's becoming less and less seedy each day, with a glassy, plastic, sickly saccarine sheen to it. Frankly, I miss the Old Yonge Street... But I digress...

The owners at one place HATED us shooting video in their place. I guess there were a lot of less-than-savoury-types hanging around there... Underworld somehow. Eh... that was the arcade clientelle. We snuck some shots anyway, and got some good footage before they noticed us and kicked us out. Then we moved on to the next arcade... there were so many back then.

Now gaming is totally isolated... Back then, you'd meet people at these places - join in together with a stranger to put in quarters and defeat the Ultimate Boss of some game... Now, we're all in our own little cells... But I digress...

Anyway, we shot footage of guys playing videogames. Some were real rockstar players: guys who were in their zone. Most were just messing around.

We also shot loads of my collection of cracked Commodore 64 games.

Plus we shot my friend Scotz (who's now a respectable advertising and real estate man, in the US), and his loopy football buddy, acting as if they were playing.

Then I cut it to Great Balls of Fire!!!, by Jerry Lee Lewis!

The result, I present here...

My next foray was some time later, in 2000, when I did something called SERVICES: The Counter-Strike Documentary (which is a whole other story...). Anyway, I put online this trailer for that documentary about Counter-Strike...

Fire Zone

Fire Zone: 1998: Front Cover Design

20th Century Military Roleplaying & Miniatures
Fire Zone is a tabletop roleplaying-slash-miniatures game I designed and wrote.

I've just uploaded it to Scribd...  Get it there for free.You can see the entire 280-page game manual there. It works well as a sourcebook for a modern military RPG campaign you might be running... I'd say it even works as a read unto itself - as a reference book. So you may find it interesting, though it's probably a bit too complex to be playable.

(Pardon the low-rez scan... It took me an entire day to scan the 1998 draft.)

Fire Zone has a long story. It contains a pretty extensive Design Notes section, in the manuscript - but I want to include some context in this post.

Along the Edges of Zeitgeist
Really, it is the anchorpoint for most of my thinking and design work around modern combat subjects. It begins in 1984, when I began to gamemaster Traveller, the roleplaying game, in a serious way.

What Alien Swarm Means To Me

A Gritty Kind Of Sci-Fi

When I was young, years ago, I used to design and gamemaster science-fiction tabletop roleplaying missions and campaigns. This was where I cut my teeth on mission design, game design - even screenwriting and filmmaking to some extent, as many of my campaigns and missions were delivered in a cinematic way.

The first "bug mission" I did, in my homebrew version of Traveller (the RPG), was even before Aliens came out. (It felt more like Alien than (read more)...

Our New Commander...

Just today, I think, I saw this amazing video by Chris Hadfield, and his son Evan Hadfield...

I've been watching it today, wondering what about it intrigues me. Hadfield's voice is borderline... If this had been some major entertainment production...

But I think that's the point of it.

What isn't so striking about it is his voice.

What IS striking about it is his demeanour.

He looks at you dead centre. And he's cool to the core. Like, this is the soul of a Test Fighter Pilot. One who succeeded in his centre-most dream-in-life: to Command a Mission in Space. He says "This is my voice..." And that's it. He doesn't challenge; he doesn't threaten; he doesn't apologize; he just claims it.

So it's that cool centre... That ultimate self-acceptance... I think that's what's so amazing about this video.

It's as if he stepped into the world of emotion and challenged its many denizens to think of the world of science. He is a scientist who dares to step into the world of art... But he does it so well because he speaks from self-acceptance... He dares to heal the rift between the logical and irrational mind.

I think Hadfield is the kind of person who is a symbol for what people need now as leaders and heroes. He's a hero for our time... funny as that may sound.

Welcome To The XFunc 2013 Remake!

I've had this website, XFunc.com, for a long time now. Twelve years. I began it in 2000 after being a fly on the wall of a Web 1.0 company called "The NRG Group". They were an internet incubator and a youth marketing company. Actually, while the incubator dried up it did spawn some lasting companies - and the youth-marketing arm of the incubator is still operating right now... It's called Youthography.com... So it wasn't a total "bust out", that adventure...

Not that I was in the middle of anything. I came into there to design a game for them about banking... To teach high school kids about banking, actually. I'll be posting descriptions of my projects over the coming days.

Anyway... I built xfunc.com then... Mostly to promote a documentary I had made about Counter-Strike. That doc went all the way to the top. Valve saw it. I had lengthy phone conversations with their agent at CAA. I talked to Cliffe on the phone (he's one of the CS mod's originators). Finally I got my own agent, and it would've been screened... but, so the story goes, they didn't like the flickering screens. I think maybe what they really meant, but were afraid to say, was that they thought it needed changes. But these large companies are wary of getting involved in creative discussions with lone individuals out there in the web-o-sphere. So easier to let it die. Now, years later, they've made a doc about gamers which follows the theme I laid down. But the production standards are more slick...

Ah, anyway.

I've decided to move away from a site that attempts to sell anyone in a "corporate" manner. Instead, this is to be more of an artist's portfolio. Please take it that way, and remember: the insights of some many cantankerous artists become the air you breath years later... though you never met them.

Am I suggesting I'm one of those guys? I don't know. Only history can judge.

But I do have ambitions to be among that level.

Anyway, I have a few fun adventure stories to tell you here. So buckle up.

XFunc Reboot 2013: Post One is Launched!